Celebrating the 20th Century

Menu

To the Deplorables

The following as well as the photograph above come from America is Dead on Tumblr. I have added capitalization and corrected some spelling from the original post. I am presenting this here as it is the first item I have seen completely capturing my own feelings about the 2016 U.S. presidential election for which I have yet to fully find my own words.
It wasn’t punditry, strategic error, or even a weak Democrat candidate. The stone cold truth is that we live among millions of selfish, complacent, imbeciles who, in 2016 with the entire world at their fingertips, obstinately refuse to see beyond themselves. Democracy itself can never work with an electorate that seethes with anger at thoughtfulness, at pragmatism, at compassion despite difference, and at smart people.

The think pieces trickling in calling liberals out for losing because of an "elitist attitude" are terribly, terribly misguided. To vilify the young, moderately well-educated people that overwhelmingly voted for Hillary — most of whom are crippled by student debt — for not caring to understand the plight of the supposedly oppressed masses of middle America is bullshit. On the contrary, we are deeply thoughtful, we are deeply concerned, and we surely care about their well-being more than they care about anyone other than themselves. We are the ones racked with anxiety over climate change, over equality, over the fate of the world, and we therefore unequivocally occupy a moral high ground when all is said and done. It is now high time we begin vilifying the “Trumpisti” and their retrograde “values” of anti-intellectualism, fear, and every man for himself. This will be a rough four years, but i still believe the idealists, the readers, the travelers, and the artists own the future. On pense, donc on est. [One thinks, so one is]